The mind creates reasons, maybe this was one. See if it sticks, see if it can survive the exacting standards of a child dredging the bottom of a pond with a branch. Interesting? Or is it pitched back where it came from and you watch it sink down again to the bottom with all the rest. Because you have to figure it out for yourself, don’t you, and she wouldn’t have listened anyways even if they’d told her back at the house that you will never, ever, not in a million billion years find a pharaoh’s mask hidden in the dark bed of a Midwestern pond. A year or so later it was Indians. They’d gone one day to a high crest above a river and she’d seen the carvings on the rock. She’d find them in the woods someday, she was certain. Because in all that living moving solitary space there must be someone like her, before her, really it was just a matter of time and so out into the world she went, after school and on weekends too when she wasn’t locked in her room reading and sometimes even with friends. Years later she’d married a man because he seemed to be from the world somehow but it turned out his wilderness was much deeper even than her own and she’d shown him all the paths and places and secrets but he told her there was no one there. No, it hadn’t worked out.

and we were posted right next to each other – hm….hehe. Thanks, Steve. I guess the thing builds up to the end, and I suppose I’m more aware of that now after your comments & Guy’s than when I was writing it. The last line – maybe it’s not the right line, could be better, too neat in some ways. But I wanted a temporal shift somehow, and without some line or other that doesn’t happen. Will think about it, and thanks again

Perhaps ‘No, it hadn’t worked out.’ isn’t the best line, referring to the other comments, it does seem to be a very different voice. Do like the idea however, how her way of seeing the world is so different, so unique to her.